


Tactile Lessons

by TheVeganTargaryen



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: F/M, Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, One Shot, Post Season 3, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, semi violent PTSD episode
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-09
Updated: 2015-09-09
Packaged: 2018-04-19 21:28:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,685
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4761659
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheVeganTargaryen/pseuds/TheVeganTargaryen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Oliver Queen is away from Starling City with the woman he loves and is happy for the first time in years. That doesn't mean all of his issues have gone away. But now he has someone to help him deal with them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tactile Lessons

**Author's Note:**

> Repost from Tumblr. A little Olicity one-shot I wrote based off a post discussing how we hope Oliver's PTSD won't be erased in season 4 just because he's in a fulfilling relationship. (Because that's definitely not how mental illness works.)
> 
> TW: discussions of PTSD & metal health. Semi-violent PTSD episode. All defense techniques discussed based on my own martial arts training. Happy ending. This just wouldn’t get out of my head. Hope you all enjoy!

The thing is, Oliver _doesn’t_ sleep better with Felicity in the bed.

The first few nights after they leave Starling City, everything goes smoothly. Felicity is pretty sure it’s because both of them are running on fumes. The adrenaline works its way slowly out of their systems. Late nights driving and talking and enjoying each other put them both to sleep, soundly for the most part. Oliver’s always awake before her, and Felicity just counts it as another precious detail she gets to know because she’s his _girlfriend_ now. (And wow that sounds so weird still but in the good kind of way: the kind that gives her happy butterflies and a smile that won’t quit.)

It’s the fifth night when that changes.

She’s woken up when the motel room is still pitch black with a yelp at the hard kick to her shins. “ _Ow_. Oliver!” He’s still asleep, thrashing, and she narrowly avoids an arm as she fumbles for her glasses first, then the light switch.

The light flooding the room does nothing to wake him, and the look on his face is enough to make Felicity’s heart break just a little. He groans something that could have been, “No, don’t,” but it’s too incoherent for her to make much sense of it.

Tentatively she reaches for his shoulder to shake him awake, take him out of whatever nightmare is plaguing him. She gets no warning before his eyes are open, and his hand is wrapped around her throat.

“Ol–” She opens her mouth, but no more sound comes out, and she chokes with the effort. _Fuck_. Suddenly everything she loves about him is mocking her. She’s having trouble breathing, and he’s looking at her, but she doesn’t think he really sees her.

She does what she can. She hits his arm with all the strength her 20-minute workout DVDs allow her, trying to break his grip at the elbow. Miraculously, a second later she’s gasping, and real air is filling her lungs.

Oliver’s come back to her. He’s looking at her– _really_ at her this time–backing up until his entire frame’s pressed against the headboard, panic in his eyes. They’re both breathing hard, and Felicity’s shaking, but she stays still.

“Felicity–” he starts, and his voice is ragged, like he’d used his own guilty conscience to cut the edges. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”

She scoots forward, rests a trembling hand on his arm. They stay like that for a long, long minute, lapsing into silence. Oliver doesn’t move. If anything, his posture gets tighter. Felicity doesn’t know what to say.

“I know you didn’t mean to. It’s ok,” she says when she settles on words. Even as she speaks, his eyes are glazed over again. “Oliver?”

“Oliver Queen is alive only in the past.” This time it’s too flat, too smooth, like something he’d memorized by rote and repeated automatically. The League.

Felicity feels the bile rise in her throat. “That’s what they told you, isn’t it?” she asks in a whisper and gets no answer. “You’re Oliver Queen. You’re here, and it’s your choice.” She doesn’t know if her words are making a difference at all.

Eventually she gets him to lie down again, still unsure how to bring him back to her. She gets up, stumbling a little as blood flow returns to her legs, and they erupt in little pins and needles. They must have been there longer than she thought. There’s only one thing she wants, and she’s up only to get her tablet and bring it back to bed.

They’d agreed to going as unplugged as possible, but there was no way she was going to go an indefinite amount of time without checking her email even (and maybe checking in with Digg when she got the chance), so it’s with her and charged. The slow Wi-fi that came with the room takes forever to load, but once it’s done her fingers are flying over the keyboard she’d plugged into the device.

It’s Felicity now who settles against the headboard, typing furiously. Oliver lies down beside her, one arm resting over her knees as he drifts in and out of something that’s not quite sleep.

The more she reads, the easier she can breathe. Information is her cure for everything, but Oliver isn’t a string of code she could rewrite. That doesn’t mean she can’t retreat into a more familiar world to get her research done.

The sun is rising when she finally shuts the screen. Oliver wakes as she finally shifts to set the tablet on the nightstand beside her. She’s just glad that at some point he’d managed to sleep. He’s looking at her like he wants to talk, but she shakes her head. “Later. I promise.” She leans in to kiss him on the cheek, hopefully enough of a peace offering that he doesn’t stress the entire time she tries to battle dark circles with some REM sleep.

——

True to her word, later comes after she gets out of bed, showers, and dresses. Oliver’s back from his run. If he notices her departure from her normal wardrobe in favor of sweats and one of his old t-shirts, he doesn’t comment on it.

“We need to talk,” she tells him, sitting him down on the edge of the bed and taking his hands in hers.

“That almost never leads to good things,” he attempts to joke, but his smile is feeble. “I just want you to know I’m so–”

“I know,” she cuts him off. “Oliver, I don’t blame you.”

“I really am happy.”

“I know,” she says again, this time offering a smile with it. “But happy doesn’t automatically negate everything you’ve been through. The thing is, I did some research last night. On PTSD. Not that I’m diagnosing you because I’m not a therapist, but then again all they really do is go off symptoms from the DSM V. And I found a copy of that on the internet among all the other things, and see, it kind of fits…”

She’s looking down at her hands by the time Oliver cuts her off. “It’s ok, Felicity. I’m…well, you’re not wrong. Maybe it’s…self-diagnosis or whatever, but this isn’t normal.”

“Actually, it’s a lot more ‘normal’ than you think for someone who’s been through everything you’ve been through. I want to help you, Oliver; I’m not going anywhere. I promise. I love you.” She loves the way he smiles when she says that even more than she loves saying it to him.

“I just don’t know why this is happening now. I’m finally away from all of it.”

“From what I’ve read on a lot of forums, it’s actually pretty common. Oliver, do you realize for the past–” she paused for a quick mental calculation “–almost _nine years_ you’ve basically been in survival mode? Now that you don’t have to be, it makes sense that more stuff is going to come up. Your mind is finally in a place where it knows it’s safe enough to take everything you’ve been bottling up and let it out.” There’s a lot more she learned, about brain chemistry levels and symptoms and medicines, but she leaves that out. This is enough, for now. Felicity’s the one who needs the information to feel better-equipped to deal with it. Oliver just needs to know he’s with someone who understands.

“So what do we do about it? I don’t ever want to hurt you again.”

“We deal with it.” She pauses, takes a breath. This next part is going to be the biggest hurdle of this conversation. “But I’d like you to promise me something.”

“Anything.”

“Don’t agree until you’ve heard me out. As much as I pride myself on being able to find any information if it’s online, I can’t get a psychology degree through Google searches. We’re going to do the best we can,” she says, tucking her hair behind her ear, “but I’m not a trained professional in handling things like this, and it’s a very real possibility that these…episodes…might get worse before they get better. So if it comes to a point where we might need help coping with some of this, can you maybe promise me that we’ll leave the door open for professional help?”

She might as well have just told him she was thinking about giving up the Internet forever and becoming Amish. That wary look in his eyes was back, but he didn’t move, leaving his hand in hers. “I don’t know if I can do that. What am I supposed to tell a shrink? Hey, I’m kind of messed up from a few years on an island and joining the Russian mob and being Starling City’s vigilante before joining the world’s worst secret assassin club?” There’s a defensive bite to his tone.

“You don’t have to give them any specific details,” Felicity pressed, because she’s _not_ sure if she’s going to be enough to really help him. “But you can get help for the effects.”

Oliver thinks about it for a long, long moment. He’s still while he thinks, and that’s how Felicity knows how seriously he’s taking it. Finally, he just nods tersely and says, “Okay.”

Felicity nods as well, unconsciously mirroring him. “Okay. Good. But that’s a last resort sort of thing. In the meantime, well, do you think you could teach me how to…” She feels guilty even asking this of him. She knows how it eats at him that he thinks he’s dangerous to the people he loves. But she powers through with some deep-down determination she hadn’t felt since she tried to smuggle Oliver out of Nanda Parbat. “…How to defend myself?”

He doesn’t even look surprised. “That’s a really good idea. Now?” When she nods, he stands up. She does too, directly in front of him. “I guess I’ll teach you how to get out of a choke hold first.” The compartmentalization is visible on his face as he switches out boyfriend!Oliver for trainer!Oliver. One day he’s going to learn they were always the same Oliver, Felicity knows it.

He reaches a hand out towards her neck and pauses, meeting her eyes. “Is this okay?”

Felicity nods. He’s fully with her, and she needs to learn through doing it. He rests his hand around her neck the same way he’d done last night but much lighter. Felicity knows she can talk easily if she needs to. “What’s the easiest thing you can do right now?”

“Punch you in the face?” she asks with a half-hearted laugh, remembering one of Diggle’s lessons.

To her relief, Oliver laughs, and it’s genuine. “Exactly. Do you know why?”

“Because you’re within arm’s reach?” This one she has to guess.

“Because no matter what’s happening, this isn’t attacking you.” He gestures over his entire body with his free hand. “This is,” he adds, tapping his temple. “The head is what’s attacking, so you shut it off as quickly as possible.”

“And while that’s great to remember for a real life situation, I don’t think punching you in the face is going to help,” she points out. It’s easy for them to relax into their usual dynamic.

“No, it’s not. It’d probably just make things worse.” He only has to think for a second before he switches gears. “So the first thing you want to remember,” he instructs, “is to always work against the thumb. If you break the thumb’s grip, I–your opponent–won’t be able to hold on. A really easy way is to just reach a hand up, grab the thumb, and pull away from the hand. You can push against it first to jam it back a little and make it easier to move. Try it.” He nods to his own hand, still at her neck.

She does it, surprised at how easy it is to break Oliver’s grip with just the one movement. He makes her practice it a few more times before Felicity gets an idea. “Could I just turn my neck in that direction and break the grip that way?”

“I wouldn’t, especially if there’s a good grip going. See, the throat is designed to take a hit head on. It collapses in that way. But my thumb would be at the side if your neck, right? The throat isn’t designed to take a hit that way, so it would be more dangerous for you to try to turn into that. If that doesn’t work, there’s this point about two fingers up the inside of the wrist, right underneath the thumb? It’s a lung pressure point, but if you hit it hard enough–like this, with your knuckles–” he demonstrates on himself as he speaks “then it causes the hand to open.”

They continue for a little more with defense, but the conversation naturally shifts to what Felicity can do once she is out of harm’s way. She takes what she learns and applies it over the next few weeks.

It’s not that they aren’t having a good time on their travels; in fact, it’s quite the opposite. On the good days, they’re happier than Felicity’s ever been and than she’s ever seen Oliver. Some days there are bad days, though. Felicity notes that a good number of the bad days correlate with days they’re on the coast, in full view of the ocean, and she starts planning for more inland destinations.

When the bad days come, she takes that in stride. It’s part and parcel with loving Oliver. She learns new things about him that way, too. She learns that talking him down out of his episodes doesn’t always work. It’s better when she waits until he’s calm enough and then reorients him into the world around him through texture. Sometimes it’s an ice cube, other times a hot mug of tea pressed into his hands, still others an extra soft blanket. She makes him talk to her: tell her the things he’s seeing, what he feels under his fingertips, until he slowly comes back to her. They usually spend the rest of those nights barely sleeping, holding each other and exchanging lazy kisses and whispered declarations of love.

The defense lessons continue, partly so she can help if there’s ever a particularly violent episode (and sometimes there are), partly because Felicity likes having an ever-growing repertoire of self defense tactics, and a good deal because of how at peace Oliver is when he’s teaching her.

Felicity wonders if he knows that his whole expression changes when he talks about this stuff. She imagines it’s the way she looks when she excitedly rambles about the latest technology on the market or hacking into a top secret government database.

It’s how she knows that, no matter how long this break lasts, they’ll eventually go back. This is what Oliver knows, and he likes it. He just hasn’t had the chance to realize that he does. He’d spent so long fighting out of necessity that Felicity thought it was only natural he’d need to choose not to in order to understand that there’s a part of him that likes it. He’s uncovered a passion underneath all of that chaos, something he’s good at and proud of. “A leftover from the island that doesn’t totally suck,” she jokes with him, and he can smile at that after a few months. She sees it on the rare occasion she gets him to sit through a whole movie; when she lets him talk through half the action sequences about what works and doesn’t work about the fight scenes; when they go running together on hiking trails and he runs ahead, off the path, creating his own parkour obstacle course. She lets him go, and he always comes back to her, smiling every time.

Yes, there will be a time when she knows they’ll both go back to Starling and resume the vigilante lifestyle, even if Oliver doesn’t quite know it yet. Felicity’s just enjoying her vacation and waiting until it’s his choice.


End file.
